Tired of Sleeping
by Mademise
Summary: Kinkmeme fill, not much to do with the Suzanne Vega song. Five 221B-format snippets, T for Insinuation and homoerotism. Johnlock. Knowing John is safe makes the shadows brighter.


Light from the outside is streaming in in angular ribbons and curves, interrupting the enveloping dark. All around them, the world keeps spinning. London marches inexorably on.

It should have stopped, John thinks as he stares at the man that's prone on the sofa, glaring at the ceiling like he's expecting it to stop existing. Time should have ended in the moment Sherlock made his way back here, because that was an impossibility to end all impossibilities.

Reality, however, just doesn't know how to give up, so on beat their hearts and on ticks the quiet, marred by the noises of traffic and life going on even when theirs were standstills for so long, eternal moments stretched out by event after event, never seeming like any kind of truth.

"Are you planning to sleep tonight?" Sherlock's voice hasn't changed, though every thing else seems like it has. The sound hotwires its way into John's spine and collapses the elapsed time and he wonders why he spent so long trying to deny things that never mattered.

"Not really," John says, an attempt at steadiness. "Why?"

"I think I've learnt what your dreams are like," Sherlock says. "A semblance of them. I could go somewhere else if you want peace."

"A bed might be more comfortable."

"Knowing you're safe makes the shadows brighter."

* * *

"Those are new, aren't they?" Sherlock's eyes catch at his nervously, skittering and uncertain and something about this just seems so _wrong_. Sherlock is a force of nature: whirlwind, fire, harbor wave. Sherlock is never unsure of anything.

"Yeah," John says, the syllable too loud, too soft, and hitting the jagged rocks of the quiet in all the wrong ways. Sherlock's acting human, and that's new too.

"Oh," Sherlock says and he's hunching over John's hands, tracing the scars and the calluses with his with his fingertips and John somehow cannot protest the quiet inspection.

"Time does go on, doesn't it?" John says rhetorically, unnerved by the hush. "Things happen."

"You met someone," Sherlock says as cryptically as if he were a fortune teller seeing John's lifetime in his palms and maybe, just once, that's all he is: not a fraud, but a human with a very good eye that lets the world see what it wants. "You met the one."

"What, Mary?" The name's bitter on his tongue like the look on her eyes had been. "She was never the one. She could have been, but she got there too late."

Again, that uncertainty. John hates seeing Sherlock like this, but it's better than the alternative.

"She would never have been enough," John explains. "After you, how could anyone be?"

* * *

"Jesus," John says heavily, and that really says it all.

Sherlock stands before him, and the light hits his skin strange, like he's not at all flesh but a corpse, and John had never seen him stripped bare in the time before but here he is now, as raw as a cadaver that has given up all pretenses at keeping a lifetime of secrets to its chest, and John doesn't think things could ever have been this way before, because Sherlock is standing before him, vulnerable.

The scars stand out in the smoothness of the shadow, hard as the edges that must have inscribed themselves against Sherlock's skin and right now Sherlock is all softness. Something wells up inside John that's a lot like anger, and he would like nothing more than to get his hands on the people that did this to the man before him.

Sherlock's eyes seek him out and if John had wondered what Sherlock was thinking, he no longer is because Sherlock is naked, in every sense of the word, and his pain is bleeding out from him and John has never been able to resist the chance to help, in whatever way he can.

One day they will be comfortable together, worn dull against each other, but for now, Sherlock is all shining diamond brilliance.

* * *

John wants to know the stories behind each hurt. He wants to marvel at them, to wonder at Sherlock's cleverness. He wants to know that the years of solitude were not for nothing, that his heart did not willingly jump into the grave of a dead man that isn't alive now. He wants to believe again, believe like an action instead of a state.

He'll ask for the tales, eventually. He'll ask when he's gathered up every inch of the courage he has knitted into his being, but not a moment before, because as much as everything has changed, Sherlock is in so many ways still the same, and John wants to be everything for Sherlock. He wants to be as much as he can, and more.

How he wants.

In the mean time, he doesn't guess, wouldn't dare to sully the truth that Sherlock holds above everything else, because what Sherlock gets out of being right isn't the act of being right itself but the act of some tiny part of the world being _correct_, being _explicable_, and that's not a thing that John would easily aspire to. He's seen what it does to Sherlock, the lengths it has driven him to.

So instead he learns what he can, memorizes Sherlock in as much detail as his mind can bear.

* * *

They've grown accustomed to each other, somehow. It would take a liar to say that they didn't find that a daily miracle that nevertheless they tried their best not to question because sometimes you know the truth in your bones, know it like a fact that you can never explain, and that act of knowing is enough, and it's better not to ask.

Sherlock has begun to tell the stories, and slowly he's getting some back too, because John has learned enough to know when to strip his heart bare and let Sherlock see. Sherlock still has scars to catalogue, but they hurt less already, because knowing that John will be there to listen makes it all easier. It always has.

John holds on to the moments like lifetimes and loves Sherlock like an action rather than a state, even after all this time, even though it's a fundamental constant of his being. He loves like a force of nature, like a whirlwind, like a fire, like a harbor wave, and still he doesn't think it can ever be enough.

His love burns like flames that will melt away the impurities of the world, like the tongues that lick away the hurt, and at every forever moment of every passing day, John lives to make the shadows of Sherlock's life brighter.

* * *

**A/N: Written for a prompt on the KinkMeme about comparing scars.**

**~Mademise Morte, November 30, 2012.**


End file.
